I appreciate that the chance of drawing various cards was finely tuned/balanced over many updates. Some cards are rarer than others.. Is it fair to say that blob is by far the rarest card to draw?

It's most noticeable whenever I co-op for long sessions (or if I have 10+ asyncs on the go), I can literally go multiple consecutive games without ever drawing blob once, some 10+ games in a row without ever seeing it..

..even on the occasions I do draw it, once or twice across that many consecutive games is still remarkably rare when you consider the number of spells to deck size ratio. I've often wondered what the exact values on each card is, I don't expect such stats will ever be published (would be interesting though).

In fairness I agree it should be a rare card and the obvious solution is to bind it (or use chaos/growth staffs more often), but is it too rare? (compared to something like icarus towers for example, which seem very common)

I wonder if the value changes if you already have a growth spell in the deck. For example, if you bind trees would the growth frequency still be 6.. or does the presence of the tree bind effectively take up the slot where a different type of growth spell could have been drawn.

..if so, I often use a magic tree bind (or vine bind for aconite) this could be why I don't draw blobs.. I liked drawing a nice range of growth spells back in the day, they felt a little more prevalent (before towers started pushing them out the deck).

Not surprised to see Icarus towers have a higher frequency than the other structures, I could feel it, it's is a very common card, really annoying when you draw 2 of them, I'd much rather draw a totem to be honest.

..Icarus towers are counted as creatures to, which I find problematic sometimes because when I draw a deck which is low on creatures I don't count the Icarus towers (or AE's) as creatures, this can make the actual creature count feel even lower.

I did wonder about gooey mass in classic, maybe frequency 0 was a temporary nerf (during the great blob scandal) ..they forgot to put it back in the game! ..I suspect you will find a few other wonky values if you dig deep.

I'd perhaps tune the most niche non-creature spells down so that rather than have a whole bunch of defensive situational non-creature spells in your hand you only get one or two to deploy, it would make them more like special defensive measures.

I'd be tempted to increase the frequency of weapons and maybe magic attacks (or rather keep their frequency the same but lower the frequency of less important spells, just to help push these ones back up the list). These spells feel so important in classic MP (you cant bind them).

Back when the overall spell pool was smaller, weapons used to one of the main non-creature cards that you would always draw (you would even draw dupes of weapons! stacking, good times ..now it keeps giving us towers instead)..

..back then, classic wizards could get tooled up more readily, they were able to play almost like a vigilant or heroic wizard (like how it was in the prototype) this made them more versatile. The games were less standoffish and stalematey when offensive non-creature spells were higher up the pecking order as opposed to the defensive non-creature spells which came later.

Is there something set in the frequencies which means that the number of Chaos and Law spells in a deck are roughly equal to each other?

Early on during development it felt like there were a lot more games where you had a heavy law or chaos deck and therefore alignment was a lot more relevant to the match and those matches were generally quite interesting. Nowadays I feel like I nearly always have a similar amount of Chaos and Law spells to which (megapsells aside) alignment becomes kinda pointless.

I'd even go as far as to say that It'd be nice overall to see growth, weapons and magic attack spells be more frequent that structures. For me all three categories are more dynamic and interesting than structures, to which I'd rather see more of those spell types cropping up in my deck.

Maybe drop structures to a 5 across the board, and bring growths, weapons and magic attack spells up to a 7.

SpiteAndMalice wrote:+1 to decreasing the frequency of Icarus Towers btw.

100% ..in line with other structures (or less), it's been way too prominent in decks for too long. It literally changed the way the game played at a time when the MP was in a really good place..

..decks were nicely balanced, blob had just received a nerf and the decreased threat of it opened up the board. Then some defensive non-creature spells were added slowing the game down and throwing the card draw out of whack.. plus the maps were reduced in size.. all these factors impacted gameplay.

SpiteAndMalice wrote:I'd even go as far as to say that It'd be nice overall to see growth, weapons and magic attack spells be more frequent that structures. For me all three categories are more dynamic and interesting than structures, to which I'd rather see more of those spell types cropping up in my deck.

Yes! ..I think the game works best with those kinds of non-creature spells more prevalent in decks (drawing dupes was nice to, it gave you 2 stabs at a successful cast, in chaos mode). Even great spells like raise dead and subversion became far less common when the spell pool was watered down.

SpiteAndMalice wrote:Maybe drop structures to a 5 across the board, and bring growths, weapons and magic attack spells up to a 7.

A compromise to drop structure rate could be to make their chance of drawing even higher with the structure staff.Structures seem to be the most handy when deliberately equipped in a combo, not so much in the classic setting.